


creep in like a whisper

by nepetrel



Category: Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette
Genre: Extremely Dubious Consent, Gideon POV, M/M, Military Hierarchy, Power Imbalance, The Bastion, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-04-06 20:35:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14065062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nepetrel/pseuds/nepetrel
Summary: The only hope of safety in the Bastion was to be rigorous about keeping yourself properly bound and to not let anything slip out. But no one could stay bound forever, and no one knew that better than I.





	creep in like a whisper

**Author's Note:**

  * For [florianschild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/florianschild/gifts).



> I would like to give a very special thank you to theLiterator for some truly heroic last-minute betaing. This would be a much worse fic without their efforts.

I awoke in the dark to Juggernaut's unearthly ticking.

Juggernaut never stopped; it was a constant hammer, inescapable, at once arising from the earth and coming from beyond it. It infected minds both suggestible and awake, prying them open with the repeated blows of a chisel, one more thing among thousands making it harder to stay closed in rest. If you were able to keep bound in yourself enough that the ticking fell into the background in your dreams, then it was twice as jarring when you awoke, a cymbal-clash to startle you out of whatever safe haven you'd made. There was no safety in the Bastion, not when you couldn't keep yourself closed forever.

Its ticking followed me as I fumbled my way out of bed and into my uniform, dressing on autopilot and pinning my short chlamys in place on top. I had remade my bunk and straightened around by the time Thea, the soldier closest to me, lit her lamp. There were no windows anywhere in the Bastion, and we were underground besides, so we were all used to dressing in the dark. Half my unit was dressed already, and the other half were close enough that they'd probably escape a dressing-down if they hurried.

They hurried, to my relief; I didn't like yelling at them any more than they liked being yelled at. I ran through inspection quickly, walking up and down the row of them, checking the bunks behind them for orderliness. Our bunker was a bare stone hole among hundreds in the Bastion and everyone's bunk except mine was doubled. There was no room to hide mess and no allowance for it either, but my soldiers were less green than I was and had left nothing to chastise them for. Finally, I nodded. “We'll drill in the east wing of the eighth floor today,” I told them.

My unit trooped respectfully behind me as I led them out of the bunker, marching in time to Juggernaut's call. I glanced back at them in the dim lantern light of the halls, twenty-four wizards all older and bigger than me, and all of them following my lead anyway. Of course it helped that I was more powerful than them, and that they were already used to accepting orders, but I hoped part of it was that I was friendly with them. Not _friends_ – I hadn't been foolish enough to make a friend in the Bastion since I was thirteen and terrified – but friendly. 

I was at the mercy of wherever my sergeant ordered me to send my unit, and she could drop in to inspect our drills at any time, but Sergeant Antropos often let me choose my own location if I included it in my weekly report ahead of time. The stated logic was that I would have to start planning my schedule myself sooner or later, but I suspected she liked the show of initiative. I clung to the hope that I would eventually be allowed to get out of the curtain-thick air of the Bastion at least long enough to drill. There was every chance that we would be sent outside to fight at some point, and I knew that everyone ranked sergeant or above was allowed to leave at least long enough to go to the market in Lamia at irregular intervals, as decided by someone higher up in the chain of command. Some of my soldiers had been outside in the years before I was assigned as their lieutenant, and though they didn't express any resentment over losing that privilege, I wouldn't have blamed them if they had.

I didn't know how long it would be until I was a sergeant myself. I knew I was sixteen, or near to it, but it was easy to lose track of seasons and years in the Bastion, to get so consumed that the only concept of the passing of time was Juggernaut's dark reminder. Sometimes even the dates I wrote on my reports seemed to mean nothing more than the difference between one tick and the next. Getting out in the open might help a little. Even directly in the shadow of the Bastion, it would probably be hard to step on a bed of springy chamomile and forget it was spring. But that was a year away for me, or more, and until then all I had to keep track of the passage of time was the dates on my reports and the awkward way I grew.

My soldiers, already full grown and far less awkward, fell into their drills naturally; running first, then combat. I remembered as a child playing soldiers with my brothers and pretending to wave swords, and for the drills my soldiers did pick up wooden staffs to channel through. But the truth was that we were the weapons, and we were the ones who would be honed.

I explained the drill as concisely as I could. I'd only thought of it a few days ago, but I thought it would be useful, and that it was inventive. (“Inventive” was another of those things that might get me promoted faster. Eusebian wizards value inventiveness nearly as much as they value cruelty.)

My soldiers would break into pairs, one attacking with magic sent through their staff and the other defending with the same. All the while I would be circling behind, attempting to breach into their minds and send them visions – and they would not know if I would reach for the attacker or defender.

“Sir!” they said, and broke into formations; as they jogged in place, I heard someone joke, “he lives to torture us,” and someone else laugh. I thought it was Talmai, but it was hard to tell. It would probably be better for me if they all thought it was true, but I had trouble pushing myself to that kind of cruelty.

My soldiers moved fluidly, attack-attack-defend, thrust-thrust-parry. For all that they were less powerful than me, most of them were more skilled in combat than I was; all of them had been soldiers for longer, and it showed. Still, they stayed alert as I prowled around behind them, keeping me in their awareness the way one pays attention to a rabid dog. And like a rabid dog, I tried to strike unpredictably. I waited until Critias opened himself up too much to attack before sending him an illusory swarm of bees, causing him to sway and miss his opening entirely; and when Mede focused too much on physical defense, leaving a gap in her self that I could squeeze through, I convinced her that Lucia was attacking from the right instead of the left, making her swing her staff the wrong way and catch the blow entirely to her side.

Lucia pulled it, but it still made an awful noise, and Mede cursed as she fell to the floor. “I'm fine, I'm fine,” she said. “That was a bastard move.” She sounded almost proud of me. My soldiers often did, and I still had no idea how to react to it, so I smiled at her and moved on.

We were nearly done when a caefida approached me, her steps quiet under Juggernaut's ticking. “A summons for you, sir,” she said, not meeting my eyes. The caefidi rarely did. For all that they were tithed two years later, in some ways their lot was worse, just as vulnerable to all the magic swimming around the Bastion but not able to see or defend against it. I couldn't say any of us tithed children were lucky, except maybe the annemer children who had scored high enough on their assessments to be sent to serve the Emperor directly. They were lucky enough to never have to come to the Bastion, at least. 

I took the summons from her and dismissed her. It could have been a bad move if it had come from an officer who wanted an immediate response, but I knew what it was before I opened it. Sure enough, General Mercator wanted to see me.

I stared at the summons for longer than was warranted. I felt a sudden impulse to crumple it in my fist, but the Bastion had a thousand eyes and you could never be sure whether any of them were turned your way. I knew for sure my soldiers could see me, anyway, and any of them could report on me at their leisure even if they hadn't been tagged to spy on me already. So instead I folded it into neat quarters and tucked it into my pocket, then brought my fingers to my mouth and whistled sharply. My unit fell into formation immediately, gathering together to turn and stand at parade rest. “You're dismissed!” I yelled. “Go ahead to mess!”

There were some ragged cheers at that. Thea brushed by me as she passed, which could have been an accident but probably wasn't, though I had no idea if it was meant to be a show of support or if she was subtly telling me she was watching me.

And then they were gone, and I had to answer to the general.

I'd had a longer reprieve than I could have hoped for. Lieutenants don't get told the movements of the generals, but everyone in the Bastion knew when General Mercator was gone, and we all knew the only place he went for long in a peacetime situation was to Aigisthos to report to the Emperor. Once, he'd been gone for nearly an entire month, but I had known better than to think that was going to become a pattern. And sure enough, here he was again, barely ten days after I'd known for sure he was gone.

I descended deeper into the Bastion.

The Bastion stole all sense of spatial orientation. I couldn't be sure where my own bunker was, though I thought it was close to one of the edges. But I knew General Mercator's quarters were in the center because they were one floor below the Vigilus, which the whole Bastion wrapped around. The layout of each floor was different, but in our first year my commanding officer had taken us to the Vigilus and instructed all of us to open ourselves to it, and since then I had never forgotten – and could not forget – the spiderweb workings of it, the questing feelers that reached out in every direction to monitor magic throughout the Empire. Like most lessons in the Bastion, it had been two-pronged:  _ do see how powerful you can become? Do you see why you should never, ever hope to run? _

If you paid attention and took the risk to open yourself up, you could feel the Vigilus's grasp throughout the Bastion, and probably throughout the Empire as well. It was why I thought the bunker was towards the outside. The pull of the Vigilus was never weak, but it was far enough away that it was cloaked, not detectable unless you looked for it, which I tried not to do. It was strongest in General Mercator's quarters, but somehow he didn't seem to mind. Long decades of familiarity, maybe, or perhaps he somehow liked it. No one understood General Mercator less than I.

The general's door was guarded by two sentries, so I stood with a blank face as one announced me and let me in. There were no secrets in the Bastion; they knew why I was there, and pretty soon everyone they knew would know too.

I'd been surprised the first time I'd seen General Mercator because he wasn't a tall man, or particularly imposing; if anything, he had reminded me of one of my teachers back in Thrax, who had loved to hold class outside in his garden with the argania trees shielding us from the sun. General Mercator even had the encouraging manner of a teacher, and I, always too open and too unwary, still struggled to close myself to it.

Today General Mercator was sitting behind his desk and muttering as he wrote. He didn't look up and so I waited, trying not to be too obvious as I scanned the papers on his desk. From my angle I could see the seals of the Emperor, the only man in all of Kekropia that the general answered to, on some of them. For all the Bastion's military might, the Emperor was the power of Kekropia, and it showed in the general's obedience to him. I had never met the Emperor, never so much as glimpsed him from afar, and I was glad for it. By the laws of Kekropia and the will of the people, he was the only divinity we could recognize, and I wasn't confident in my abilities to properly fake that.

General Mercator finished his letter and turned to me. “Ah, Gideon!” he said. He always called me Gideon, not Lieutenant Thraxios, even in front of other ranked officers. It made my skin crawl. “I hope your unit is doing well.”

“Sir.” I saluted. “I've had them working on simultaneously defending against mental and physical attacks. We ran a drill today where they attacked each other with physical magic while I tried to pry into their minds; it was very effective.”

General Mercator nodded along as I spoke. He always somehow seemed to listen to me more deeply than anyone else did. “Have you thought about having them simultaneously attack mentally and physically?”

I paused. “To the best of my knowledge, that's not possible, sir.” But my curiosity had been aroused, and I could hear it in my own voice.

“To do so successfully – no, probably it is beyond your unit.” His little smile suggested that it was not beyond him. I suppressed a shiver. “But the attempt itself will be instructive. Such an attack requires dual thinking. On one hand, your soldiers must find a physical focus to send magic through, such as their own weaponry; and on the other hand, they must mentally grasp their opponent and work on them through the level of symbology. Such an attack would require keeping part of the mind in the physical and spiritual realm at the same time, and so is technically possible for all wizards, who of course are always in this state; but the mind is more fragile than the magic, and most can never achieve the mental discipline required.”

“Like the Vigilus,” I said, and then clamped my mouth shut.

But General Mercator only smiled at me, the smile that said he was pleased by my cleverness. “You caught that in a single visit, did you?” he asked. “An excellent sign. Yes, the Vigilus works through a combination of architectural thaumaturgy, worked on the currents of the air themselves, and thaumaturgic architecture, to detect and reach out into any magic it encounters. Usually it is difficult to send magic so difficult from its host, but the architectural structure embedded in the air helps it keep its form. The best wizards can find unconventional channels to use as architecture. I once saw Colonel Parsifal loosen a man's skin at the same time she reached into his mind and convinced him he was on fire. He rolled on the ground to put it out and in doing so skinned himself.”

“Loosened his _skin_?” I asked, horrified, even as I remembered a half-second later what I always forgot: to be distant, to be formal, to be _seen but not heard_.

General Mercator nodded. “It sounds difficult to you now, doesn't it? At your level, you're more used to magic that takes time and space to cast. But at its most fundamental, magic only needs a framework to act upon and a will to push it to act. Half of your studies will be training your mind to consider new and unusual frameworks. That's how I healed my hand,” he said, spreading it on his desk. “Come, take a look.”

I moved in so I could peer at it. I wasn't completely unfamiliar with the precepts of healing magic, though I'd never worked any myself, but everyone knew General Mercator had done something near-impossible by regrowing his two fingers. I could see exactly where they'd regrown – there was a thick knot of scar tissue over his first two knuckles from where they had been sliced off.

“You still had your knuckles,” I said out loud, and General Mercator nodded. “So you used those as a foundation, and...” I stopped. That was about all I had, but General Mercator was always happy to give me a hint.

“Reach out with your magic a bit,” he urged, and I did, loosening my hold on myself just a sliver to let my magic run through the channel, flowing through his hand and around the scar tissue. I frowned and pushed harder, following it with my fingers. It didn't have any problem on the hand itself, or even on the regrown fingers, but the scar tissue, and everything that laid underneath it, was impossible to traverse; every time I tried I got stuck, like I was trying to wade through glue. It wasn't a foundation at all. It was more like...

“You didn't regrow your fingers at all!”

General Mercator laughed. “Excellent, excellent! No, I didn't; Lieutenant Aramac was quick-thinking enough to recover my fingers from the battlefield before they could be trampled or lost, and I ordered them to be kept under spells to discourage deterioration until I had an opportunity to decide what to do with them. It took nearly a year and most of the fingers then still attached to our prisoners, but I was able to find the right sequence to push my magic through to renew the connections between my fingers and the rest of my hand, treating it all as one framework and using the scar tissue as a bridge. And now it's as good as new; I can write as well as I did before. Touch as well as I did before,” he said, turning his hand over to grab mine.

Caught, I stayed still as his hand moved up my arm in a caress, and he moved his body just enough that I was fully between it and the desk. It was ironic how the general kept praising my intellect when I kept making the same stupid mistakes over and over again. I'd told myself that I'd stay formal and keep my mouth shut, but I couldn't keep my tongue from wagging. I'd reached out and  _ touched _ him, for the Emperor's sake. 

It was my fault. General Mercator wasn't like this with anyone else, and I was always so  _ open _ with him, so stupidly unguarded and informal – I encouraged it, time after time, and somehow I couldn't make myself stop. So I didn't fight it as his hand moved to my thigh, and when he told me to sit on his desk, I sat.

This close, his magic was nearly overwhelming, so strong that it threatened to fray the edges of my control.  _ I am a corpse, _ I told myself.  _ My soul is a corpse, and my magic is the sealed tomb that holds it in the dark. _ It worked. When he kissed me, the only thing I opened to him was my mouth. 

-

I was able to catch up to my unit for the tail end of lunch. Lucia greeted me with a shout, and Critias and Grete slid apart to let me sit between them, but I still felt disconnected, out of sync. They were already done with their food when I was just starting, and their conversations had already moved through the familiar cycle of complaining about it to gossiping over their tea to picking up and leaving. My unit was allowed an hour's break after lunch to sleep, and most of them gladly took it as early as they could; drills were exhausting and the day was only half over. By the time I had scarfed down half my fish, my unit had nearly entirely dispersed. Of course the mess was still packed with other units, and I recognized some of the lieutenants, but I didn't see either Thaddeus or Ephra, and I didn't feel like talking to anyone else.

General Mercator had given me a book before I'd left, _A Prisoner's Treatise On Healing_ , and I was eager to read it. But books were rare in the Bastion and secrets were even rarer; everyone knew who gave me books, and I wasn't nearly as eager to remind them of it. So instead I finished eating as quickly as I could and headed back to our bunker.

Lieutenants didn't get their own rooms, but my bunk was set apart a little, far enough that I could turn the light on and not worry about disturbing anyone. I was tempted to read _A Prisoner's Treatise_ now, but instead I pulled out my daily reports and started jotting down notes on the morning's training exercise while the memory remained fresh. Sergeant Antropos expected completeness, and failure to meet her standards could be excruciating.

There was something soothing about writing it all down, anyway; it had become enough of a routine over my years as a lieutenant that I felt myself relaxing as I wrote. Daily reports were probably the easiest things I had to write, anyway. Difficulty in performing was not treated as disobedience; the worst that could come of it was additional instruction, which could be painful in the short term but was almost always fascinating.

As I finished up writing, I let loose a sliver of my magic for my usual check over my unit. I hadn't thought before of how it moved, and there were no currents in the still, heavy air of the Bastion, but I thought now that I could see the logic in treating air as a structure as my magic moved from soldier to soldier. I was glad General Mercator had explained it to me. Otherwise I would never have thought to check.

My soldiers were older than me and had been tithed at my age, so they all knew to keep themselves anereimos even in sleep. This didn't mean they were all good at it. That level of containment was difficult to achieve, and something I struggled with still.

In my first unit, when I had been a green recruit huddling in my bunk and pretending the sound of Juggernaut reminded me of the sea, my commanding officer had sent us awful dreams if we left ourselves ereimos in our sleep – monsters and fire, Marathat forces killing our families, our mouths filling with blood until we drowned in it. We'd all woken up screaming more than once from it, and there was no shame in it, but I couldn't bring myself to do the same to my unit. For all that it was probably much more effective than the rebukes I gave, it was hard to summon up that kind of cruelty. Making them run until they dropped was about as creative as I could get.

Not everyone was sleeping. I grimaced. It happened fairly often, but I hated checking the minds of people in the middle of sex. That was one thing my commanding officer hadn't had to worry about with a unit full of terrified thirteen-year-olds who could barely stop crying as they slept.

I didn't bother picking over their minds closely. Of course during sex one person would be open – it wasn't worth checking, and I tried very hard not to judge whoever chose to be open, as stupid as it was to do so willingly. I didn't have room to judge. But I did note who was sleeping together, and I wrote it down in my report as well. As the commanding officer, I was required to report all liaisons up the chain of command. I was required to report a lot more than that, but at least if I reported on the boring details of fraternization I could avoid the more pointed attention that came if I failed to report enough. It wasn't as though Sergeant Antropos would do anything with the information. Not unless someone tried to run.

I should have slept when I was done, but I was too jittery. I took  _ A Prisoner's Treatise _ out of my front pocket and placed it under my bunk, besides the two other precious books General Mercator had given me,  _ An Exploration of Permanent Thaumaturgical Structures  _ and  _Inquiries into the World’s Heart._ Then I took my outer layers off and slid down my bunk over my blanket, doubling my chlamys up to lie underneath it. 

Ephra had told me once that lying down with your eyes closed gave you nearly half the benefit of sleep. I didn't know if this was true, but I knew that lying there with my eyes closed I saw another pair of eyes above me, pure white and shining.

_ My Lady, _ I thought, and felt myself mouthing it a moment later. 

Perhaps She smiled at me. I don't know; I could see Her eyes and nothing else. But She watched me the whole time I lay there, and by the time I had to get up again, I did feel rested.

My unit got into stand-to without any input from me. I thought sometimes that having a lieutenant at all was mostly a formality, as they were all older than I was and better soldiers to boot, for all that they did not have my opportunities to advance. But I still went down the line, checking them again – or more thoroughly, for the ones who had been otherwise occupied instead of sleeping – and nodding as I went, trying not to notice how my footsteps naturally matched Juggernaut's rhythm.

The only hope of safety in the Bastion was to be rigorous about keeping yourself properly bound and to not let anything slip out. This was supposedly training for the battlefield, where a moment of inattention could leave you open to hallucinations or worse, but I'd spent long enough in the Bastion to know that Eusebian wizardry and its associated hierarchy required prey to work. Allegedly we were all on the same side, though, so if you wanted to attack an underling, it was best to pretend there was a learning opportunity involved.

I wasn't too interested in pretending, so I didn't particularly like stand-to, where my soldiers were required to crack themselves open a little so I could check their magic. Nothing stopped me from rifling inside but my own honor and the memory of what it felt like every time my commanding officer did it to me, searching for religiosity or suicidality so closely that I could feel the moist panting of her breath against the back of my neck.

Possibly I was doing them no favors by not checking closer, not when I couldn't keep them and their next commanding officer was more likely to be stringent than lenient. But there was only so much that I could make myself do, and so after only a brief check-in, I let them go.

In the field we would have to take multiple shifts patrolling instead of the bare one in the evening we were required, but in the Bastion we spent most of our time rushing around or waiting. So after my unit had had to get up for check-in, it was immediately free again. Though we were technically on call and not allowed to leave our bunker, my soldiers were allowed to do what they wanted. Already I saw Thea curling back into her bunk to sleep again, and in the next bunk over, Critias and Mede were shaking open a deck of cards and inviting all comers. Sima was meditating, or perhaps praying, though not the kind of prayer one offered to the Emperor. I looked away from her. Technically nonstandard religious practices were another thing I was required to report on, but Sima could just as easily be finding her own way to be anereimos. Reporting it wasn't something I would do until I had to, so instead I retrieved _A Prisoner's Treatise_ from below my bunk.

It was a strange book, tall but not wide, and with a ridged spine. The title was crammed awkwardly onto it between two ridges. It was bound in some kind of leather and edged with brilliant gold. There was a sigil in the middle of the cover, probably that of the wizard who wrote it, but it was blank otherwise. I turned to the first page.

_ I am writing this treatise from an imprisonment that will tear away what is left of my life, _ it read. 

_I write not to convince the Cabaline order of my innocence. My sentencing proved to me two things: firstly, that I am innocent beyond any doubt, and that this court knows it; and that the Mirador and all the abased practitioners who sit within it are uninterested in guilt or innocence. The wizards of the Cabaline order have less honor than vipers and even fewer scruples. They fight and scheme and fornicate like alleycats and have neither the sense nor the reason to do so only out of sight of their lords. They have no wizard generals, no units, no structure at all. So thoroughly do these Westerners lack the control and order of the Bastion that their annemer courts must name every kind of magic imaginable forbidden to keep them from using it in their wars._

_Annemers understand nothing, and this shows in which magics they have declared heretical. Any wizard worth the name knows how to kill with wards, and yet it is for the crime of healing an elder of their own court that I am imprisoned in this warded cell, deprived of all light and reason._

_Night and day I send to the Bastion, begging for help, and night and day I pray to the Emperor, may He reign forever. But in my heart I know I will die here without even the opportunity to properly pass on my magic. In its stead, I can pass on only this treatise, assuming that the Cabaline court does not declare writing itself to be heretical. May it live on as my legacy._

I read it again, stunned. Cabaline wizards weren't ordered into units? How did they report to their commanding officers? The author said they had no wizard generals – did they not have commanding officers at all?

I kept reading, but the author didn't mention anything about how Cabaline wizardry was structured again. The healing was fascinating, and I wanted so badly to learn how to do something with my magic that was purely helpful, but my mind kept wandering back to those cryptic words about the Cabaline wizards. Perhaps it isn't surprising then that I fell asleep.

In my dreams I stood on the docks of Thrax, staring out into the sea. I was waiting for the ship that would take me to the Bastion, but somehow, through the logic of dreams, I knew that it wasn't coming. I turned to look at Thrax behind me, and I thought,  _ I could go home. _ But just then there was a shuddering under my feet, and the docks unmoored themselves from the land. The waves curled over the sides of the wood like greedy fingers, pushing me to sea, and I found myself stranded, surrounded by water on all sides.  _ I can swim, _ I thought, but the waves were pushing me out faster and faster, until Thrax was only a dot on the horizon, and I was alone.

And then a voice said behind me, “Thrax, was it?”

I shut my eyes against the humiliation, just for a second, in hopes of gathering myself.  _ Stupid, _ I thought. I'd already left myself open. That's how she got in. 

I turned and saluted. “Yes, ma'am,” I said.

“At ease, lieutenant,” Major Karras said. “We have an attempted escapee in your quadrant of the Bastion, eighth floor. You and your unit are to bring her in alive.” She reached out and touched my forehead, and in the way of such sendings, I awoke immediately with the escapee's face burned behind my eyes.

I stood immediately, putting my chlamys back on even as my face burned. I hadn't felt the major enter my dreams; she had had to use no force and probably no trickery at all. What would I have done if she had entered a dream of the White-Eyed Lady? Nothing, I suppose, except know that the Bastion would only turn a blind eye to my worship until I was disobedient in some other way, and then I would choke around the empty space where my tongue used to be in one of the Bastion's thousand dungeons. It was unlikely that they didn't know about my faith, but it still felt wrong to display it where nonbelievers could see. That was the logic of a mystery cult - everything sacred was to be hidden, and everything hidden was sacred.

I shouted my unit to attention and tried to put it out of my mind. Dwelling on things was another way to end up open when you didn't expect it. “We have a runaway,” I told them. “A private with short red hair, still in her uniform. She should be on the eighth floor. You are responsible for that floor and the ones directly above and below it. We're expected to bring her in alive.” I said that last sentence while already striding for the door. I didn't want to see any of my soldiers' faces change in response. Anyone brought in alive on charges of attempting to desert could only hope that they would not stay alive long; the purpose of such an order was to keep their death from being too quick, and the Bastion had thousands of ways to draw it out.

I sent Thea with five soldiers up to the ninth floor to sweep down and Antreas down with another five to the seventh. The remaining half of my unit followed me up the winding stairs to the eighth. There was nothing straightforward about the Bastion; to go down a floor often required going up a flight of stairs, or going past your destination and winding back around. Even experienced soldiers could get lost, and none of us knew the Bastion completely, but in a chase like this it only helped us. Only one of us needed to see our prey to call for all of us to fall on her like wolves, and a single wrong turn or dead end would hurt her a lot more than it would hurt us.

In any case, we all knew the eighth floor well, as it was my favorite to train on. I wondered if Major Karras knew this, and if that was why she had picked my unit, but I pushed it out of my mind. “Take flank,” I told Isandro, who nodded and let the rest of us past him before falling in line.

Something about the Bastion resists magic. Attempts to affix spells to its architectural structure slide right off; spells that should affect its actual workings rebound strangely. Trying to look beyond its walls to the outside world just made the ticking of Juggernaut so loud it filled both your ears and eyes. This made magically tagging the walls to see where you'd been before useless, and even nonmagical means like papers or thread tended to blow away mysteriously. So the runaway wouldn't know where she had been, and she wouldn't know where she was going, either; there are no windows in the Bastion, no cracks or holes in its stone exterior. As far as I know there is only one way out, though I have no idea where it is. The major undoubtedly had older and higher-ranked soldiers there, but it would be better for my unit if we didn't let the runaway get that far in the first place. 

For once, luck seemed to be on my side. We'd traversed maybe six or seven corridors when I saw a flash of red out of the corner of my eye. “Fan out!” I yelled, readying a spell in my hand.

The runaway turned sharply into a side corridor, but it was no use; we had her scent. We chased; there was no point trying to cut her off, not in the Bastion where we were just as likely to get lost as well, but all it took to guarantee that she would meet a dead end was some patience.

In the end it took less than that; sensing us closing in, she stopped in the middle of a hallway, fingers sparking. For a moment I was taken aback by how young she looked, maybe just a year or two older than me and made more vulnerable by her desperation. But her eyes were wild, and the moment I looked into them she threw fire at me.

It was almost certainly illusory, but I dodged anyway, trusting my soldiers to do the same. I could hear them spreading out behind me, getting into position to circle if necessary, as I threw my hand out.

There was no hierarchy to what magic was easiest or hardest. Compulsion was simple on an open mind and impossible on a tightly bound one; physical magic on a stationary object held in hand was trivial, but a moving target like the runaway was much more difficult. I didn't have her trick with the fake fire, though with my eyes open to her I saw the magic running down the lines of her fingers and thought I could copy it later, but I was developing my own specialties, and I used one now.

In the Bastion, the sound of Juggernaut is inescapable, and I knew better than to fight it. Instead I added to it, fluting in a high-pitched whining that seemed to come from nowhere. I saw the exact moment it pierced into the runaway's head; she clapped her hands over her ears instinctively, her hearing entirely consumed. She didn't hear Grete until she was on top of her. The two went down in a pile of limbs, the runaway trying to claw out Grete's eyes the whole way down, but Grete was one of the tallest and broadest among us. The runaway couldn't reach, but Grete had no trouble grabbing her by the shoulders and bashing her head into the ground once, twice, three times, until she was dazed and unmoving.

Grete rolled off her and Isandro took her place immediately, binding the runaway's hands behind her. “Good work,” I told Grete, and she nodded at me curtly.

I did the sending for the major. I didn't bother reaching for Antreas or Thea; I wasn't a strong enough sender to reach out to someone who wasn't deliberately listening to me. Major Karras would do that herself. Isandro kept a knee on the girl's back to keep her from going anywhere, but the fight had left her already. The only impulse left in her was to die; I could see it in the way she kept twisting her neck and whispering at it, as if she could convince her magic to slit her own throat if she tried hard enough. I felt a kind of weary pity for her, but it was no use. Pushing magic to physically split open anything, even something as yielding as flesh, took more strength than she or I had. None of us owned our own deaths.

The major showed up quickly. I wondered if she had been heading for us already instead of waiting at the exit. It was odd, if there was really only the one; but I couldn't think that in front of her, not when she'd already pushed into my mind once today, so instead I focused on the runaway and saluted. “Major Karras!”

“Lietenant Thraxios,” she said to me, and I took the cue to be at ease. Her magic was a testament to her rank, bound up around her so tightly that even this close I could barely feel the outline of it. There was a lieutenant behind her, who I could only see the shoulder and elbow of, but it was a familiar shoulder and elbow – Thaddeus was there, and so was probably the runaway's commanding officer. Damn, damn.

Thaddeus's face was impassive, and for once in his life he'd managed to close his magic up too, enough that I could barely feel the warm ends of it licking out. “Major Karras,” he said, his voice near breaking, “with respect, I must ask leniency on behalf of my soldier. She is newly tithed and misunderstood how to properly ask for permission to visit the markets.”

“Must you?” Major Karras asked, her voice betraying nothing, but I thought underneath it she must have been amused that Thaddeus thought there was a way to save this. And Thaddeus did, clearly, trotting out this stupid, obvious lie about how she wasn't _really_ running, and probably trying to figure out how to pin it on himself besides. “And what do you think, Lieutenant Thraxios?” 

The girl was dead. She was breathing brokenly next to me, great jagged heaves of breath that were as close as she could get to crying with the binding on, but her death had already been given to the Bastion in every way that mattered, just as her life had been before. The horror of that nearly stole the breath from my lungs, but my own death had been promised to another, and that gave me the strength to keep Thaddeus's from the Bastion for at least a little longer. “The...runaway left her barracks without permission,” I said. “She deliberately evaded the patrols. When my unit was dispatched to retrieve her, she fought against us, showing clear knowledge of her transgressions. She also demonstrated cleverness and cunning; I believe she hid her intentions from everyone. The fault is entirely her own.”

I looked Major Karras in the eye the whole time I spoke, but I could see Thaddeus turning to stone behind her. I'd spent the better part of two years begging him at every opportunity to keep himself properly closed, to not be such easy prey, and finally he was listening to me.

Major Karras knew it too; there was a little smile playing on the corner of her mouth. General Mercator had told me once that all the higher-ups that dealt with the lieutenants were almost like teachers, and I could believe they were the Eusebian version, at least. They all seemed to like it when something could be a learning experience for everyone involved, and doubly so if the lesson was painful. But all she said was, “I agree. Lieutenant De Lalage, please take her down to the fourth floor dungeons.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Thaddeus said. His voice betrayed nothing, hardened by fire into stone. I knew in that moment that he would never lift that veil of flames he used to protect himself for me – or anyone else – again, and I was stupidly grateful for it.

I stepped aside to let Thaddeus collect his runaway from me, and he did, not looking at me or her even once. Another soldier came to help Thaddeus, and with one of her arms in each of theirs, they dragged the girl back past the major. The girl made no attempt to help, her legs dragging over the stone floor with every step. She knew she was dead already too.

“Good work, Lieutenant Thraxios,” Major Karras said to me. “Your unit is dismissed from its evening patrol.”

“Thank you, ma'am,” I said, and then kept my mouth clamped tight, all the way back down to the barracks.

I could taste ash in my mouth the whole night. Thea, annoyed to have missed it, made Isandro recount the whole thing. He did so gladly, spinning it out into a climactic battle against a wily villain. Grete kept interrupting to correct him, and of course no one could make it five minutes without insulting anyone else. The whole of it was too loud to read over and too jovial to join. They kept trying to include me anyway, and only an iron will kept me from snapping at Lucia when she blithely prompted me to fill in what Major Karras had said.

“Do you think she'll be executed?” I asked instead, and that shut everyone up. We were all grimly aware that an execution was the best a runaway could hope for, but none of us liked to see it, though as the retrieving unit we would be obliged to stand there with Thaddeus's unit and watch. In the Bastion, the cleanest deaths we saw were those of the suicides we were sent to cut down from their ropes sometimes. Eusebian wizardry prizes inventiveness, and few things were as inventive as an execution designed in the Bastion.

“If she is, I hope they don't plan it for tonight,” Grete said. “It's been a long day already.”

“And we haven't even gotten to eat yet!” Ectione said. “At least evening patrol's canceled.”

There were some grumbling agreements, and at that the conversation broke up.

The somber mood carried into the evening meal. I kept my head down as I ate, and on either side of me Aedias and Critias loudly spoke, as if they could cover me with their voices. They didn't even know why I was upset, and I only half-knew myself, but still they tried to protect me in the limited way that they could. Being a lieutenant was strange like that, simultaneously the leader and the baby of your unit, and I was aware again all at once that I couldn't keep them forever. Another year or a year and a half at most, and then I would be promoted again, and suddenly I was ashamed for wanting it so badly. I swallowed around the lump in my throat, missing them all even though they were all around me and probably half of them were secretly reporting on me to the sergeant besides.

To banish my bad mood, I chose that moment to badger Critias about his eating habits, or lack thereof. Nothing helped me stop thinking about my own problems like starting to think about someone else's.

Critias glowered under the attention. “I'm just sick of all this fish!” he complained. “When's the last time we had a nice goat? Just a bit of shoulder, that would be enough to satisfy me.” But he started eating his stew faster anyway, so I considered it a victory.

I was so caught up in monitoring him that I didn't hear Thaddeus approaching until he was on me, clamping a hand on my shoulder.

Aedias and Grete both rose immediately, perfectly ready to defend me, but I waved them down. “It's just a talk between officers,” I told them, though anyone at the table could have told that for a lie; Thaddeus's magic, still lashed tightly around him, was roaring fury and nothing else. In a way it was an amazing defense. I'd never had thought that someone could keep themselves contained by sheer rage.

Thaddeus's face was just as contained, but barely so; it seemed like his rage might spill out from any direction. “Major Karras has decided that Leonor will not be executed, and instead has been sentenced to a lifetime in the dungeons,” he said.

I nodded, wondering if he'd been told to come tell me as much. My unit wasn't required to stop by and watch a prisoner suffering the way we were required to watch an execution, though we were invited to if we wanted to.

But Thaddeus wasn't done. “Her tongue has been cut out already,” he said.

“She was a cultist?”

“Yes,” Thaddeus said. He was staring at me so intently he could've burned a hole through me. “Why are you – ” 

He stopped, and I was suddenly aware that somehow, against my will, my face must have given me away. No one else would have caught anything, but Thaddeus had known me as a terrified thirteen-year-old, and some of that child must have still dwelled on my face. “Really,” he said, his voice dripping disdain. “For all that you play at the loyalty of a dog – you're a catamite _and_...?”

He could have made my life considerably harder by finishing that sentence. While the Bastion technically turned a blind eye to our worship, this only lasted until it became public, and then it would obligingly string me up right beside the girl - beside Leonor. It was probably why mystery cults flourished while every other religion quietly dropped off. But Thaddeus didn't finish. I kept my eyes trained somewhere over Thaddeus's shoulder, and I heard him grind his teeth violently shut before striding away, carrying the scorch of his magic away with him. 

My own unit was watching me. I forced myself to turn back to my food and shove a spoonful of stew in my mouth, though it tasted like nothing. Eventually they followed as well.

In a rare moment of sympathy, Thea said, “it must be hard, having one of your soldiers turn out to be a traitor.”

“Yes,” I said. “It must.”

-

That night, as I lay on my side in the dark, I almost didn't reach out to check my soldiers.

I had been waiting for hours for someone to come and drag me before the sergeant, but it seemed that Thaddeus really was keeping my secret, though he hated it and me along with it now. I had somehow gotten out of it with nothing worse than the loss of a friend, but it still felt like the loss of something larger.

I made myself reach out, in the end. I cared for my soldiers, but I knew better than to trust them. There could be no worse time for someone to whisper into the sergeant's ear that I was shirking my duties.

Closed, closed, closed; everyone was closed to me, row after row of locked doors that I could not trespass. Every face in the dark was turned from me, and I could not read the lines of a single soldier's back. I was relieved. I didn't have the will left in me to rebuke anyone, not if I was going to keep myself contained as well.

I turned on my back to stare at the darkness above me, where earlier today I had seen the White-Eyed Lady appear to offer me succor. Had that really only been hours before? I wished for her to appear again, but the Lady could not be summoned; I walked Her labyrinth to reach Her, but I wouldn't know where I was within it until I reached the end.

Juggernaut thundered under me, through me. Mechanically I put two fingers against my pulse and counted the beats, keeping an ear to Juggernaut's ticking. The two were still out of sync. I was not my own, but neither was I the Bastion's.

Reassured, I told myself, _a tomb. I am a tomb...my soul is dead, it has been dead all along,_ the prayer of those devoted to the White-Eyed Lady, and felt myself closing, every part of my self still and quiet inside. I fell into a sleep like death, where only the White-Eyed Lady could reach me, and the muffled but inescapable ticking of Juggernaut underneath.


End file.
